One of the joys of attending a general physics conference like Physics@FOM is that I get to attend the sort of talks that just never seem to turn up in a universe near me. So when I saw that there was a session on subatomic physics packed with talks from cosmologists and other people of that stripe, I knew that I had to attend.

The idea of extra dimensions is, of course, nothing new in physics. But we know that these dimensions have to be small. It’s not just the fact that we only perceive four dimensions directly; forces like gravity and electromagnetism see their strength fall off as the square of distance, so they would change strength at rates faster than the square if there were other dimensions around. The role of these extra dimensions, though, is thought to be quite important. There is a huge disparity between the strength of the electroweak force and gravity, one that needs to resolved before unification of the forces can take place. (There’s also the matter of the masses of the different particles, which we can measure but not explain.)

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Is that a singularity in your dimension or are you just happy to see me?